Knight of the living dead

When Clive Stafford Smith went to America 27 years ago to campaign against the death penalty, there were no executions. Last year there were 59. "We are definitely winning," he says.

Now Clive, a bespectacled former public schoolboy, is back home, and out to convince us that the just-released Guantanamo Bay detainees mean no harm to anyone. Take his client Richard Belmar, a 25-year-old ex-postman from north London. Before converting to Islam, explains Clive, young Belmar used to go to raves. "Afterwards he grew better behaved." Hmmm. Under questioning in Guantanamo, the reformed raver apparently confessed that he had to leave Britain in a hurry after being fingered by the police on an assault charge. Somehow he ended up in Afghanistan where he studied war tactics and AK-47 handling, and on one occasion ran into Osama bin Laden, who "was just talking similar to what we are doing now".

In fashionably liberal circles, 45-year-old Stafford Smith is an authentic modern hero – a man New Labour can truly call its own: eloquent, educated, and thankfully unburdened by anything resembling a working-class background. Last week he was basking in the glory of a last-minute reprieve granted by an American court to Kenny Richey, a Scottish-born Death Row inmate. Richey, 40, was found guilty 18 years ago of murdering a two-year old girl and had already said goodbye to his family when the stay of execution, urged by Stafford Smith, came through.

As captain of rugger at Radley, an all-boys boarding school, Stafford Smith worked upon his fearlessness; off the field, an essay he was given to write about capital punishment changed his life. During a recent appearance on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, for which his record choices included You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate, and the Peter Gabriel dirge Biko, Stafford Smith revealed that he thought he was writing a history essay. When he discovered that the death penalty was still in use – and newly legitimised by the US Supreme Court's landmark 1972 ruling in the case of Furman v Georgia – he decided to do something about it.

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He had already gone sour on Britain. He didn't like the sense of "being privileged", and says he felt something akin to relief when his father's farming business got into difficulties. He spurned the chance of a place at Cambridge and set off for America, first studying journalism with the idea of writing campaigning articles. Later he switched to law, taking a degree at Columbia University in New York, and joining an anti-deathpenalty group in Georgia.

Ten years ago he established his own practice in Louisiana, where he claims to have saved dozens of men and women from the death penalty. From time to time, condemned wretches of vaguely British provenance would surface in the headlines back home, and Clive would be quoted on their good points. But, generally, he made few waves on either side of the Atlantic.

"I think he is wrong on a lot of things," says John Sinquefield, the assistant district attorney for the Louisiana district of East Baton Rouge, who has frequently clashed with Stafford Smith in the courtroom. "Smith's life over here has been spent to the benefit of the most violent, hardened criminals. The worst of the worst. And I think some of his tactics do damage to victims and victims' families."

This was putting it politely. The only complaint most Americans have about the death penalty is that it isn't used often enough. Polls show that close to 80 per cent of voters support it. Louisiana, where Clive plied his trade, was particularly quick to bring back the electric chair after the Supreme Court ruling, and public opposition to its use is near to non-existent. The news director of one New Orleans television station says: "The only way it's a story is if they throw the switch and the guy lives. If he dies, it isn't news."

Is this anyone else's business? Stafford Smith argues that it is, and that as in Europe, where the death penalty vanished without any evidence of popular support for its abolition, right-thinking individuals and high-minded governments "should lead by example".

Stafford Smith was born in Newmarket, Suffolk, where his parents ran a stud farm. Remembered by his contemporaries as an eccentric youth who once posed as "The Minister For People with Un-hyphenated Double-Barrelled Names", he confesses, even today, to a certain degree of dreamy idealism.

He believes, for instance, that all serious criminals are, to some extent, mentally ill, that jails are pointless, and that society should not revenge itself upon people by locking them up. Instead, he says, there should be "secure establishments" where the bad guys can be sent, to protect the rest of us.

Not much of this washed in America. Abolitionists such as Stafford Smith may have an argument, but they lack a constituency. "There's no doubt that Death Row will be abolished, and I know I'll see it in my lifetime," he says. But in the meantime he has decided to carry on his campaigning back in Britain, with his wife, Emily Bolton, a fellow anti-capital-punishment campaigner. He now describes America as an "intensely unpleasant" place – a description many on these shores might apply to Stafford Smith's own particular vision of Utopia.

Crime? "It is laughable to suggest that Britain is a crime-ridden society," he says. "It is so much easier to inspire fear and hatred than offer the constructive solutions necessary for complex problems. So we are raised to hate and fear 'criminals', a small class of people who have very little impact on our real lives."

The War on Terror? "One thing I would encourage all Muslims and non-Muslims alike to recognise is that this is a war on all Muslims, not a small group. If we don't stand up for each other and fight, then we are all going to lose."

He will be linking both these themes when he joins George Galloway MP in addressing East London Communities Against State Terror on Tuesday to discuss "the rise in Islamophobia and the criminalisation of our communities".

On the basis of his previous utterances, Clive was awarded the OBE in 2000. Naturally, he had to struggle with his conscience before accepting. "When she [the Queen] gave me the medal," he confided in an anguished account in The Guardian, "this kindly old lady was probably nodding off after making brief small talk with a hundred momentary acquaintances. Amid so many others whose worthy acts took place far closer to home, she seemed confused when her equerry whispered some hint as to why I was there, having fought in faraway lands against the death penalty. When I thanked her, and suggested that I hoped one day to ensure that no executions should be carried out in her name or anyone else's, she simply nodded." He should consider himself lucky that the Queen didn't set the corgis on him.

Now he is all over the Guantanamo Four. Rather than keeping the released detainees under constant surveillance, argues Clive, the Government should be lavishing care on them. He depicts them as basket cases, reduced to shambling incoherence by their ordeal. "I pity the poor chap who will have to follow them 24 hours a day," he says. "He will be bored to death." Perhaps, but security, as the people who scan bags at airports know, is a boring business. Which is partly how we got into this mess in the first place.

There is, moreover, a contradiction in Stafford Smith's view of the Guantanamo effect. "It is said that for every one in there," he says, "it spawns 10 terrorists, but it is more like 1,000. And if people aren't radical when they go in, they sure are when they get out." Which sounds like a good reason for keeping them in sight. Unless your name's Clive and you like Hot Chocolate.